Hi, may I assume you want to automatically feed the otherwise human answers to the dialog presented by the search engine/catalog ?
This is possible but at least a little tedious. First you shold make sure that there positively isn't any HTTP RPC (no misspelling, I mean remote proc call) access to the engine; this would be much easier (google e.g. has one with its google API and asking others may show up some enlightening results). The most problematic aspect is that the human interface is not considered fixed (not even necessarily the answer part) and may change without notice.
Apart from that, talking to a web server is just opening a socket and talking to that
socket in HTTP style.
Googling HTTP and RPC brings up the ideas about automation over HTTP, basis of some APIs around (some stock quote feeds work this way too, e.g. yahoo).
HTH
Sven
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Donatas [SMTP:MDonatas@centras.lt] Gesendet am: Montag, 2. Februar 2004 11:48 An: php-windows@lists.php.net Betreff: imitating browser
Has anyone ever tried to imitate a browser with PHP or seen code snippets that could help?
Scenario would be (everything via PHP):
-login to the page sending username and password and all other necessary fields via POST
-now that the script is "logged in (session started)" we my use a search form to search anything we need by sending POST queries to ex. search page (search doesn't work if you are not logged in)
-save those pages (trivial part)
I am pretty sure that has to be possible with sockets and things alike. Any help is appreciated!
/Donatas
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And then there's PEAR::HTTP_Client which will do all of this for you.
-- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>
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